Underwood & Underwood Real Photo Stereoview

Kanas City Flood of 1903 - A total of 57 people died, 38 of those were in Topeka. 

Only one of seven railroad bridges in the Kansas City area survived the flood. The floods of 1903 and successive years eventually led to a flood control plan implemented with the New Deal in the 1930s.

The National Weather Service reports the disaster brought Topeka's second-highest Kansas River level on record of 38½ feet on May 30, 1903, which was eclipsed only by the flood of 1951.

In the mid 1800's, despite the chance of flooding, Kansas City continued to build in the lowlands. After the railroad arrived in the 1860s and the Missouri River was bridged, the West Bottoms along with bottomlands on the Kansas side boomed with rail yards, stockyards, meatpacking operations, grain mills and elevators, farm equipment businesses and wholesale warehouses.

By the turn of the century, when the metropolitan area had surpassed 200,000 people, the bottoms proved an easy victim when the rivers topped their banks. In 1903 a late spring flood did just that. It shut down the Kansas City water supply, the natural gas works and the electric generating plant. Without electricity, the basic means of transportation for thousands of city dwellers — the streetcar — came to a halt. A score of deaths were attributed to the flood and thousands temporarily were homeless.

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